Turkey has intervened more aggressively in Syria since 2016, as the Turkish occupation of parts of northern Syria has led to ethnic cleansing.
After the January invasion and depopulation of Afrin, Turkey invaded Tel Abyad in October 2019. Turkey claimed that it had to invade Afrin to secure its border, but there were no attacks on Turkey from Afrin.
Turkey backs a plethora of Syrian rebel and extremist groups that have wreaked havoc across Afrin and Tel Abyad, destroying the sites of indigenous Kurdish and Yazidi minorities and kidnapping women.
A variety of voices including locals said that the actions of Turkish-backed “Islamist extremist groups” against minorities in Syria reminds of ISIS behavior. ISIS committed a genocide against Yazidis and other minorities in 2014, killing thousands.
It appears that Yazidi villages in Afrin have also been subjected to ethnic cleansing and their shrines destroyed under Ankara’s occupation of that part of Syria.
Turkey’s role in harming minorities was a legacy of the 1915 attacks against Armenians and other Christians in Turkey. Some of these Christian minorities had fled to Syria after 1915, only to find their villages once against threatened by Turkey and Turkish-backed groups.
According to experts, Turkish president Ragab Tayyeb Erdogan involved in destroying the shrines of minorities, ethnically cleansing other minorities and engaging in demographic change similar to what was done in the Balkans in the 1990s.
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